Still, a great UI, one hallmark of products sold through a PLG strategy, really does matter at enterprises. Recently I heard a Fortune 500 company CISO compare two solutions, noting that the product from the Battery portfolio company he ultimately selected was chosen for its great UI. In his words, the competitor’s product “looked like a third grader built the interface… why would I pay for that?” The bottom line is that selling into enterprises looks different depending on how your product is actually adopted by internal groups, and by whom. To succeed, you need to understand the power dynamics informing buying decisions today, which remain very important. That starts with answering two big questions. Question 1: To whom are you selling? If you’re selling into a cost center like IT, HR, legal, and so on, you should ifrst recognize that cost centers are where the majority of technology is procured inside an organization. That’s a good thing, by and large. That said, it does mean that annual budgets, shitfing priorities and, likely, a legacy process or tech stack may create some switching costs for your target users. The second challenge: Cost centers don’t expand the company’s top line. Your solution might be great, but you still have to sharpen your pencil and prove why your buyer needs your widget over hundreds of other competing priorities. Even if your technology is an open-source or SaaS solution, that doesn’t necessarily mean an individual contributor can simply swipe a credit card because they like your sotfware. In most organizations, this employee will need to jump through a lot of hoops before they can adopt a new tool. You’ll need to enable security, compliance, collaboration and more to get budget- approved dollars. This isn’t always true, but it’s true more otfen than you might suppose. In a recent conversation with Goldman Sachs, we asked how easy it is for a developer there to adopt a new sotfware testing tool, a market deifned by PLG companies such as Slack, Atlassian’s Bitbucket, HashiCorp’s Vault or Selenium. Without missing a beat, the Goldman executives replied that systems are (continued on next page) 6